Keeping up With the Jones?

I have this thing—in the grand scheme of my many issues I do have one slight problem that has recently come up. I’m awful with boyfriends, or to be clear, awful with mixing them into my friendships. See, I’m just not that good at it and haven’t really had to in the past all that much.

I spent all of college single and outside of a few dalliances here or there I was pretty much a single for those four years. I didn’t really do this on purpose as much as it just seemed to happen. I didn’t really want to date and so I didn’t. What this means is that most of my friends never really had to deal with dating Rory.

Then in Los Angeles things were slightly different. I dated Enrique for all most two years and during that time he only met with my friends a handful of times. Part of this had to do with the fact that he didn’t like most of them and the part was I was in a weird retail world that really prevented me for having normal social interaction at points. My status with him was so bad that Henry didn’t even know I had a boyfriend until the day after I broke up with him.

After Enrique there was a long string of casual attachments or doomed hook ups. There was the fiasco with Nick (I like him, he likes me, we hook up, we don’t talk to each other, he gets sober and we both realize it was a mistake, then he gets all cutesy with me and throws me briefly into a tizzy.) This served as a distraction from real dating and then I continued the same pattern with Chance. (Except he didn’t get sober and we never really figured out why we couldn’t be together. Que sera.)

And now there is Samuel—my first real boyfriend in what seems to be a lifetime. He likes me and I like him and so I have been slowly trying to get him in the swing socially. I have be having a hard time getting him into small group interactions due to all the parties but decided that I needed to try and work on getting him alone with my key peoples.

So Saturday Kelly, her long distance boyfriend Johnny, Samuel and I went out for brunch at the Farmer’s Market—mostly to get fruit for the Super Bowl sangria—and get started on project boyfriend. Outside of a bit of awkwardness in the car—we were tired and sleepy—we ended up talking and joking around on our way there in Kelly’s car,

I was surprised at how easily it all went—no weird silences or stunted moments. We ate delicious crepes and made small talk as we picked our way through fruit and toy stores. I was so happy watching Johnny’s mild amusement with Samuel as Kelly and I looked for star fruit among other things. My favorite part had to be Samuel giving Johnny and Kelly bites of his truffles as we made our way through the market. It was fun and silly and I realized it is not as hard as I thought.

Cause I rally do like him and I think my friends are starting to like him as much as I do. They don’t have to but it’s nice that they seem to. It’s rather important to me.